Concepts

To both ease the transition, and make tags more powerful, we are including a few concepts into our implementation:

New 'Geographical Context' list

We are introducing a new category list to replace the current 8,000 strong category dropdown (and/or auto-complete textbox), you may find this referred to as 'Top level Category' - a name used during development to distinguish it. The new list is much shorter containing only around 45 items, so is both quicker and more convenient to select. It is also fixed, requiring work from the site developers to change the list (no more 'Other').

During image submission will still need to select from this short list, but an important bonus of this, it will help refine the tag suggestions making the tagging process quicker (should you wish to tag the image - a practice certainly encouraged).

The PGC is stored as a tag, meaning can actually add several to an image, it makes the tag list useful both for categorization and tagging.

Category will live on as Tag(s)

The category currently assigned to each existing image will automatically become a tag. This means that all existing images will have at least one tag, but also importantly the information represented by that category is not lost.

Mapping the current category list to 'Geographical Context'

Again to help the transition, and to make the tags attached to the back-catalogue of images more useful, we are seeking to assign as many as possible of the current list to the new 'Geographical Context'.